The reelection of Barack Obama was won by people, not by software. But [the]... edge was provided by the work of a group of people unique in the history of presidential politics: Team Tech, a dedicated internal team of technology professionals who operated like an Internet startup, leveraging a combination of open source software, Web services, and cloud computing power.

They faced a weighty task—as one tweet, from Scott VanDenPlas, the head of the Obama's DevOps group, put it "4Gb/s, 10k requests per second, 2,000 nodes, 3 datacenters, 180TB and 8.5 billion requests. Design, deploy, dismantle in 583 days to elect the President"—but it didn't phase them.

Instead, they achieved the seemingly impossible: a behemoth of computational grunt that suffered just 30 minutes of downtime during the entire election campaign. Of course, tech didn't win the presidentship—but it went a long way in helping. You should read the whole report over at Ars Technica. It's inspirational stuff. [Ars Technica]